Abstract
For a poem that ostensibly celebrates disengagement from the world and its commitments, political, intellectual, and emotional, Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” has prompted a surprising number of critical attempts to align it firmly with some explanatory system. One critic lists them: “philosophical (Cartesian dualism, Stoicism, Hermeticism, neoplatonism), theological (Augustinian, Pauline, Song of Songs, biblical, Christological, apocalyptic), and aesthetic (pastoral, typological, allegorical, classical, metaesthetic).”1 We might add scientific systems to that list (vitalism, anatomical knowledge), although, curiously, debate over Marvell’s political affiliation (loyalist, “trimmer,” republican) has not extended to readings of “The Garden.”2Of course, there also exists a body of criticism that recognizes the difficulty of tying the poem to any system, praising instead its irony and allusiveness, yet there remains something unsatisfying about such readings.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Eugene R. Cunnar, “Names on Trees, the Hermaphrodite, and ‘The Garden’,” Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992): 121.
Cunnar cites Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter, 1989), 179–197.
John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 98.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 21–22.
Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 221–244.
Rosalie Colie, “My Ecchoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 16.
All references to Marvell’s poetry cite Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (New York: Longman, 2003).
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 14.
See John Henry, “Thomas Harriot and Atomism: a Reappraisal,” in History of Science 20 (1982): 267–296, for the idea that “when philosophers began to recognize the need to eschew ‘occult’ qualities and powers from their explanations of natural systems, they turned to the mechanical philosophy which relied on the notion of contact action between bodies in motion for its explanatory force.”
Descartes, René, Les Passions de l’âme in Oeuvres, ed., Charles Adams and Paul Tannery, 12 vols (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897–1910), vol. 11, 75: 119 and 73: 118, cited in Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 317.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed., Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1955), Part 1. Section 2, Memb. 4, subs 3, pp. 286–287.
G. Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 272–273.
Gail Kern Paster, “Nervous Tension,” in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio, eds, The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1997), 107–128, esp. 118.
Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1630), 45.
See essays by Gail Kern Paster and Mary Floyd-Wilson in Paster, Floyd-Wilson, and Katherine Rowe, eds, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), for the interpenetration of body and environment in the sixteenth century. Marvell, writing near the end of the dominance of this system of belief, views this interpenétration through the estranging lens of wonder.
Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London, Thames & Hudson, 1979).
John Hunt Dixon, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
See Barry Weiler, “The Epic as Pastoral: Milton, Marvell, and the Plurality of Genre,” New Literary History 30 (1999): 143–157, esp. 150, for the idea that the enclosed space of the garden is also analogous to the “boundedness… of lyric utterance.”
Walter Charleton, The Darknes of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature: A Physico-Theologicall Treatise (London, 1652), 133. On the link between Charleton’s Royalism and his vitalism, see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 297.
Christine Rees, The Judgment of Marvell (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), 187.
Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Thomas Healy, ed., Andrew Marvell (New York and London: Longman, 1998), 58–59, has argued that “although the speaker’s ‘fall’ may successfully be divorced from any negative biblical implication, it entails his own ‘passivization’ and a corresponding transfer of agency to the virtually force-feeding landscape.”
Victoria Silver, “The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell’s Pastorals,” ELH 68 (2001): 29–55, esp. 31.
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Vintage, 1943), 83–84;
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” Upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, rev. ed. 1960), 20.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 22.
John Klause, The Unfortunate Fall: Theodicy and the Moral Imagination of Andrew Marvell (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983), 115, notes the bird’s self-absorption, while Silver, 42, is “inclined to regard this ecstatic pleasure as being of the same order as the voluptuous one.”
Sir Thomas Browne: Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 7 and 14 (Part I sections 1 and 9).
Otto Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 26.
The Elizabethan poet John Norden, (1614), cited by Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery, 48.
On gathering bees, see Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 57–59.
Virgil, Georgics, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), book 4, line 3.
Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997), 454.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2007 Mary Thomas Crane
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Crane, M.T. (2007). Marvell’s Amazing Garden. In: Floyd-Wilson, M., Sullivan, G.A. (eds) Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230593022_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-54658-9
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-59302-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)